The Ultimate Revision Timetable

Why Use a Revision Timetable?

A revision timetable is an essential tool for any student. They are great tools to reduce anxiety and stress about upcoming exams, optimise focus and manage your time more efficiently.

In theory, laying out an exact plan of how you are going to cover all the topics needed before exams is a surefire way to release some nerves and get a grasp of the challenge ahead. The problem is when it comes to executing the revision plan!

Everything looks better on paper than in reality - so it was a mistake I made once too often to think if I could draw out a schedule to cover a day's revision for each subject and pretend that I would stick to it and reach my goals. Oh how wrong I was…and by that point, it was too late to do anything but panic.

So what are the options? What sees the best results? I’m going to explore the traditional revision timetable and its issues and introduce a more dynamic alternative that I think we should all be suggesting to friends, students and children alike.

Prospective Timetable

This is your traditional revision timetable that consists of a calendar-like grid with each day split into blocks of time. Sometimes hour-by-hour, sometimes morning afternoon and evening or it was just one subject per day and the rest was up to you!

One thing they all had in common, at least in my day, was that they wasted a lot of time (and paper) as you tried and failed to work out what subject or topic goes where - and how many times you should repeat that subject before the exam date. Of course, a priority was to ensure it was done in technicolour!

Although the technology of making them may have evolved, there are several things wrong with them that technology could never solve. It’s why I only saw the best of the best and most organised students make use of them - and who knows to what effect.

Here’s why I think they are fundamentally flawed:

1. Students have to predict weeks in advance what topics they will need to revise - and when they will be free to do it. Otherwise, it is left last minute until they know their schedule.
2. If you don't follow it to the letter you lose track of topic coverage and demotivate yourself. If you do, you often find yourself wasting time repeating topics you actually feel very comfortable with and other topics suffer.
3. It focuses too much on tracking revision time during a given day, rather than intrinsically monitoring the amount of progress in a topic. Isn’t it better to think about how to progress your knowledge as the topics don't change, when available times, schedules and motivation do all the time?
4. It needs to be edited a lot or redone periodically. It is often a cognitive challenge to organise it properly, with equal or proportional time distribution to the topics that need it. This is often such a barrier to actual revision which puts students off actually starting, giving room for procrastination - sometimes for weeks or months.
5. No easy way of recording how much of each topic you know - once you tick off the revision period, it's hard to identify how it benefited you towards your overall learning goal or progress in that subject to inform future revision periods.

With that said - I think it’s time we all admit that a revision timetable that functions more like a class calendar is simply outdated at best - but if it has been working for you and serves you well, by all means, keep it up! There is not much need to rock a boat that floats.

For everyone else who's always struggled to make a traditional timetable stick let me introduce its younger, top-of-the-class, Oxford graduate cousin: the retrospective timetable! 

Retrospective Timetable

What is it?

A retrospective timetable is a planning tool often used by students to help them stay on track with studying and meeting deadlines. Unlike a traditional timetable that schedules future activities, a retrospective timetable involves tracking what has already been completed. 

What Makes it Retrospective?

It’s called retrospective because it focuses on looking back at past actions like homework, past papers or textbook exercises to guide future decisions on what to prioritise. 

This can be a useful tool for students who may struggle with sticking to a planned timetable that they have to work out before they even start revising and would benefit from a more flexible, topic-centred approach to time management.

What Makes it Better?

In essence - a retrospective timetable is not too dissimilar to a traditional prospective timetable. In place of dates down the main column, we replace them with subject topics. 

Rather than putting a topic in each time block like a traditional calendar-style timetable, you just add the dates you revised a certain topic to the corresponding row and colour code it to represent how comfortable you feel with that topic. 

It’s important to reflect on this honestly, asking yourself: If the exam was tomorrow how would I feel about a question that came up on this topic? For that reason - it’s important to only make these progress reports in exam conditions. For example, when you have tested yourself in a closed book exercise, used flash cards or tried past paper questions without needing help.

You can create your own colour code with up to 5 levels, but we recommend keeping it simple with a traffic light system: 

Red = Really Struggling - Only getting the odd question right.

Orange = OK - Still don’t remember a lot of content and losing marks.

Green = Good to go - I’m getting close to full marks in every question.

Using the dates and confidence levels is what makes this method so effective. You can decide what to revise based on whether a topic hasn’t been revisited for a week or so, or if you can see that a topic is still red - then you should prioritise that until it is at least orange.

Why it Makes Sense

There are several reasons this new method is proving to get results for those who know about it:

• It’s directly linked to progress - every day you are tackling the thing you find the most difficult, not just because you scheduled it weeks ago or find it more fun to revise.
• It allows flexibility - where you can decide what to revise and when around existing or last-minute plans.
• It emphasises progress rather than time spent - so you can tell the difference between 30 minutes doing past paper questions compared to hours reading notes.
• It motivates the student by removing all unknowns about their knowledge. Listing out every topic you need to study is a useful exercise in itself - better the devil you know! 
• Setting it up once early in the year prevents cramming and panicking later on, taking very little effort to stay organised and revise efficiently to maximise results.
• It encourages regular active recall and spaced repetition, both important scientifically proven revision techniques.

Using a Retrospective Timetable

Setting it up

It can take a while and some skill to set up, so we recommend it only for Year 11 GCSE students and older - I still used this method in my university course and it was so helpful, that I feel like I need to share this secret! 

To save you the hassle, feel free to use our basic template for popular GCSE subjects with some examples. Click the image below and make a copy for your own Google Drive!

It helps to have some basic knowledge of how to fill in and format a spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. They are all similar in how they work. 

Otherwise, you can just use a table on a Word document! If you need some assistance, ask your online tutor, teacher or parent on help on how to organise all of your topics. 

Once complete, it’s super easy to use it to track revision of any kind which gives students the confidence that they are making progress. 

How to Use it

1. Create a spreadsheet or table for each subject. It’s best to use a computer/tablet so you can edit it wherever you are revising.
2. For each subject, write down every topic that you will be assessed on in one column. Ask your tutor/teacher for help, or look on your exam board’s website for topic lists.
3. Each column should be labelled as a “pass” or repetition. One “pass” is a specific targeted revision period on the corresponding topic lasting at least 20 minutes.
4. Every time you decide to revise specific topics - write the date in the corresponding box, starting with the first pass.
5. Each pass can be either a method of passive revision or active recall. Focus less on the actual time spent and more on covering the whole topic to either test your progress or advance your knowledge.
6. During passive revision - write flashcards or make a list of questions you are learning about. Link them to a new column in your table for next time!
7. If last time you covered a topic passively, test your active recall this time and do a closed book test from your flashcards, and questions or use online past paper questions.
8. Once you complete a session, assess how confident you are feeling if the exam is tomorrow. Use the traffic light system and fill the box with the right colour.
9. Rinse and repeat steps 4-8 until as many topics are green as possible, you may need to revise each topic up to 10 times or more if you struggle with it.
10. Prioritise topics in red first, putting the next date in the pass column for each session.
11. If several are the same colour, choose the one you haven't done in the longest time or the one you know you are less confident in.
12. If a topic is still in orange on pass #5, consider finding a tutor for specific help with this topic - sometimes asking for help is the most efficient use of your limited time before exams!

Some quick links to relevant core subject tutors:

• GCSE English Tutor
• GCSE Maths Tutor
• GCSE Biology Tutor
• GCSE Physics Tutor
• GCSE Chemistry Tutor

Bonus Features

• If you set this timetable up early in the year, you can mark each topic as you cover them in school provided you have got some feedback to go on. Nothing should be green straight away - spend at least some time practising even the easiest topics in test conditions.
• Group the topics into the exams they will appear in, so you can track the amount of time you have to cover them when the dates are released - making it easier to see what topics you need to prioritise getting to green before the big day!
• Reward yourself after you get a topic to green - add a box in your table for each subject so you are reminded of the incentive. Maybe parents can help make this reward extra special!

Conclusion

One of the main benefits you will find is having a very clear layout of the task at hand that you can refer back to regularly. I found it quite motivating as I ended up carving out small increments of time to revise whenever I could, just to get the satisfaction of checking off another revision session.

It doesn’t help anyone to glance over topics thinking “I know that!”, to then get to revision much later on and realise there is a lot more to cover than you scheduled for in your head. I’ve been there - exam panic sets in and the subsequent feelings of dread and avoidant behaviour - something to be avoided at all costs!

This method gently introduces accountability to the revision planning process without making you do mental gymnastics to create a traditional plan weeks or months ahead in the future. All you need - is a list of your topics, a table and a will to succeed to get started.

For that reason - I recommend setting it up as soon as possible in the Autumn term once you know all the subjects and topics you are studying. It’s daunting to see the volume of knowledge teens are expected to absorb every school year, but productivity tools like this can turn any average student into a superstar in the exam hall. I wish you the very best of luck!